WASHINGTON: Former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto feels that her swollen feet may have saved her life when extremists apparently used a baby strapped with explosives to harm her during her triumphant homecoming rally.
Bhutto told The Washington Times that a man approached her armoured truck and was trying to hand across a small child as her motorcade inched through the thronged streets of Karachi on the evening of October 18 on her return to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile.
Bhutto remembers gesturing for the man to come closer. "It (baby) was about 1 or 2 years old, and I think it was a girl," the PPP leader said.
"We feel it was a baby, kidnapped, and its clothes were rigged with explosives. He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I'm a mother, I love babies, but the (streetlights) had already gone out, and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt," Bhutto said, adding that she would have been killed had she not stepped back to loosen the shoes on her swollen feet.
"The baby, the bomb, it went off only feet from me; there was nothing between us but the wall of the truck," she said.
"We were rocking from side to side, this huge truck. We saw the bodies, the blood everywhere; we saw the carnage. Some bodies were naked, with their clothes burned off," she added.
Bhutto said she complained to President Pervez Musharraf and demanded an investigation. "I wanted him to say to me, 'BB, bring in Interpol, Scotland Yard. Let's get to the bottom of this.'"
Instead, Bhutto said she has "not been allowed" to file a police report.
Bhutto also said she was "lucky" to have her husband Asif Ali Zardari, who is considered by many in Pakistan as a political liability on account of allegations of corruption against him.
"People say he is a liability, but they hit me by getting at him," she said.
"I am very proud that he has stood by me; he stood his ground ... He is a proud man, and he was humiliated.... I don't consider him a liability," Bhutto said.
"I always think, what if he was not as brave as he turned out to be? What if he had listened to the army and divorced me? He could have chosen his business, you know. But he has paid a lot politically and personally. I am very lucky to have him. I think that people respect that he has stayed with me. If he had left, it would have been even worse," she added.
